Because US patent system effectively legalizes extortion. Some manufacturers rolled over and paid "licencing", but others, like Infineon decided to fight. The jury in Infineon v. Rambus ruled in favor of Infineon, but then Rambus appealed to the federal circuit and got that decision overturned. PJ, of groklaw fame, put it thusly: "federal circuit has never seen a patent it didn't like".

This is just a short summary, you can find more info if you like. Rambus extorted money from pretty much everyone who has so much as touched RAM.

This is absolutely disgusting. Rambus is the ultimate patent troll. For those not familiar, here is some history.

Back in the 90's, Rambus became a member of JEDEC, an industry consortium of RAM manufacturers. JEDEC rules require members to disclose any patents that are relevant to the technology being discussed. Rambus didn't. It sat in on the meetings, listened, and modified its pending patent applications to cover DDR RAM. After the new RAM standard was adopted, Rambus surfaced its submarine patents and started suing everyone left and right.

Add to that the fact is that Rambus itself does not manufacture anything -- it's a technology licencing house that has a few engineers and an army of lawyers -- and you get a perfect example of a patent troll.

In other words, do they get to print their own money?

Everyone gets initial copyright term of say 10 years. After that, it can be extended by 1 year if the copyright holder pays a fee of $100. To extend it for another year, the fee increases to $200, then $400, $800, etc.

The intent is to give everyone a limited copyright protection. Then, if the copyrighted work is truly valuable, the copyright holder can extend the term by paying a fee. But, the fee increases exponentially every year. The exponential increase in the copyright extension fees reflects the cost to society to extend this monopoly. At some point, extending it will no longer be profitable.

The net result is that all the "abandonware" enters public domain quickly, but authors can still milk truly valuable works -- for a while.

> And it would be trivial to do so with a system WITH DRM restrictions.

false. The way DRM works is that the content is cryptographically encrypted. And only the vendor has the decryption key.

> Say, what percentage of MP3 players support Ogg and FLAC? Just curious.

pretty much all of them.

> I have no presence in the US, not having lived or worked there for 20 years. However, because I haven't (yet) handed back my US passport, the US thinks I ought to be subject to income tax. No other developed country claims the right to tax people who neither live nor work in the country.

I already explained that this is completely backwards. This rule should apply to corporations, not individuals.

> The US already does that for personal income tax, but surely you can see the issues:

Yes, it does and this is completely backwards. Individual US citizens (who have presence in only one country at a time) have to pay taxes on their entire income, even if it was made outside US. Corporations (who have presence in multiple countries at the same time) can segregate their income by country, which allows for these accounting tricks.

> And you will happily pay personal income tax to the USA and the UK and France and Germany and Japan, right? When they declare you owe them for whatever reason?

1. UK, France, Germany, etc. cannot declare that I owe them anything because I have no presence there.

2. All of the countries you listed have tax treaties, meaning that tax paid in one country is deductible from the tax due to another country. The result of that is that you do NOT pay US tax + UK tax + France tax + ..., but rather max(US tax, UK tax, France tax, ...). This does create a question of how to fairly allocate taxes among the different countries, but that can be worked out with international agreement.

The reason these loopholes work is that multinational corporations can allocated their costs to high-tax countries and profits to low-tax countries. For example, a US operation "licenses" some software from a subsidiary in Cayman Islands or pays for "consulting services" that end up eating up all of the profits. Through these tricks a US corporation ends up with near-zero taxable income, while all the profits are transferred to tax havens.

The solution is to tax ALL profits, regardless of which country they were supposedly "earned" in. That way, transferring profits to Bermuda or Luxembourg will have no effect.

You are either stupid or you are being deliberately misleading. I can see 7 i3's launched all the way back in... Q3 2012. Nothing before that, and no mainstream i5/i7's. All the other Core CPUs in that list are for laptops (sockets BGA1288 and FCBGA1023).

In contrast, every single one of the AMD CPUs supports ECC and that has been the case since AMD64 launched.

As Dawkins himself points out, evolution is quite good at optimizing away traits that are detrimental to survival. Therefore, there must be some advantage to religion.

Humans are no longer subject to traditional evolutionary pressures (starvation & predation). We are the apex predator. The only animals we have to compete against are other humans.

There are only two ways one group of humans can outcompete another group:
1. increase their birth rate
2. destroy the other group
All successful religions promote both of the above goals. (Or, conversely, a religion is successful to the extent it promotes them).

Here are some of the traits that successful religions encourage:

- improved internal cohesion & loyalty. Religions provide certain rules for dealing with other people. These rules must, at the very least, incorporate reciprocal altruism ("do unto as you would have them do unto you").

- enhanced xenophobia. The hatred of the outsiders (particularly those who believe a different set of fairy tales) is proportional to the internal loyalty. Realistically "love thy neighbor" applies only to the members of the in-group, while the outsiders can face anything from discrimination to turture & death. It's no coincidence that so many wars have a strong religious component.

- increased birth rate. There is a strong positive correlation between religious belief and fertility. This is partially a side-effect of the religious dogma (e.g. ban on contraception, sex education, and, in general, infantile attitude towards sex). It can also be part of deliberate strategy (e.g. Quiverfull movement today, mormons in 19th century, etc.)

- coping mechanism. Turns out religious people are, on average, happier than non-religious. Probably because when something good happens, it's evidence that god loves you, and when something bad happens, it's part of god's plan and he loves you.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I'm sure you can think of more. But the point is, successful religions encourage believers to have more babies and kill off the non-believers.

That's what this Hogan guys says, but there was no 10 year limit. He made that up. The exact question the judge asked was:

That's why they have transcripts, you know.

Will they grow lasers on their heads?

> Quite possibly because wind turbines are horribly ecologically destructive, economically costly devices which are actually an energy net-loss for the size necessary for industrial generation, while costing taxpayer money to subsidize someone else's false industry? That, and they're annoying (at best) to live near.

haha, not. Not even close. Environment impact of wind turbines is far far less than that of coal power plants. And claiming that somehow they are "energy net-loss" just makes you look stupid.

To the guy carrying the sign that says "my property value is now $0" I want to say: sell it to me for $1. Surely, if he truly believes the property is worthless, any money he can get from it is pure profit.

I really want to hear what are the supposed "health problems" attributed to wind turbines. Amazingly, the same people who protest wind turbines have no problem with coal plants spewing ash and sulfur dioxide on their land.

> Well, you try to create a search service that is not free (= funded by ads) and I think you will quite soon realize what Google has done to the prices of online search. But that really was not my point.

and?
(btw, were you aware that web search was free (= funded by ads) for a decade before google?)

> Google search is a monopoly in the sense that most people use it and the google.com front page.

you clearly don't understand what a monopoly is. Please at least *try* to comprehend the definition. NeutronCowboy posted a good link. "most people use it" has absolutely nothing to do with it.